I shall share a personal experience and opinion, I’m telling y’all early so you can skip it if you want.

I finished several projects with AI assisting me in my work. As someone who has masters degree in AI (done before current AI craze) I really wanted to see the new thing in action, even though I knew it was over-advertised and over-hyped.

AI is a good tool for a programmer in the same sense as Google Search is a good tool for a programmer. And just like haphazardly copying code from stackoverflow doesn’t make you a good programmer, neither does AI. Anyone who tries to either have agentic AI write everything for him, or just copies code from LLM will eventually end up with confusing mess that even experienced programmers will have hard time to work with.

AI is good for quick questions - what is the data type, what is syntax here and there, what library provides specific feature… but terrible at making, expanding and managing large projects. Few years back I would tell my peers “just google it, you will get better results” but sadly Google Search entered such a terrible enshittification phase even before AI craze, that in my personal experience it’s faster and more accurate to ask LLM most coding questions.

Purely vibe coded apps are abandoned because the proper answer to “can a vibe coder add feature X to his app” is sadly and expectedly “fuck you”. My current project - Baba Yaga was created with AI assist, by treating AI like Google Search and occasionally as a junior dev to re-write boring parts (that could have been done with a script probably). If all LLMs got shut down tomorrow, my workflow would barely change, I would just start complaining about current state of Google Search a bit more.